The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Be sure not to rise above your station. Remember who rules." He tweaked her thread, pulling control of her body away for a moment, and she stiffened. For seconds he prevented her from breathing. It was a game, one of many.

  He returned control, and she gasped for breath. Dizzy silver spots danced before her eyes, but she managed to keep her feet. He wouldn't like it if she fell.

  "I remember who set me free," she said, looking into his stinging white eyes. "I remember who made me what I am. How could I forget my Lord and master?"

  He waved a hand, tiring of the flattery. The decision was made.

  "Go, then. Take the battalion of your choice. I want the girl crushed and prepared for Lazarus protocol. Once she falls, the SEAL will crumble. The Last Mayor will be unable to resist. I entrust this to you."

  Rachel gave a sharp nod. There. It was done.

  "I swear, the girl Anna will die today."

  14. APIA

  Anna jumped and dreamed and stood up shields. She left lepers behind her like cairns stitched across the world, snatching glimpses of a hundred different realities that all somehow existed at once.

  She saw deserts where whistling sand zephyrs spun about the fragmented ruins of ancient civilizations; columns stood in rows, the giant face of a woman emerging from a hill of sand.

  She saw a gray-flanked wolf pack stalking an elk through hoar frosted tundra, cornering their prey in the dead-end between two sunken cars and a highway support column. Their teeth closed and blood flashed, and then -

  - ice climbed up a dark cliff-face like translucent vines, perfect and crystalline and so pure that -

  - wide, shimmering waters peaked and troughed around her, perched atop a greened spit of rock like a mossy emerald in the midst of an ocean, until-

  - a rolling valley opened up ahead, of such breathtaking beauty that her heart pumped like a steam train and -

  - voices swam in the lengthening black static between jumps, becoming a place unto themselves, filled with hurtful old images that only grew louder and more raucous.

  "Honey, I can't read you any more Alice tonight."

  The old words echoed with the ringing clash of old shame lurking in the darkness and the final sighs of people dying, and Ravi bleeding in the corn and Amo shambling near. She heard the Jabberwock flapping near, while somewhere on an island her father stood and roared into the skies.

  One by one the bunkers came back to life.

  First of those was Istanbul. They sent for Lucas but she didn't wait; had nothing to say. She left within minutes of forming the shield, jumping across thousands of miles with her hundred-league boots. In Zarafshan, Uzbekistan, they stared at her like she was a messenger from on high, atop a dusty gray steppe.

  "Go," she told them. "Before more bombs fall. Talk to Istanbul. I can't stay."

  They stared until she flashed out of existence and away.

  In Lucknow, India, there were monkeys hanging from low boughs in the trees around the bunker entrance, watching as she brought the people buried below back to life. In Nagqu, Tibet there was a strange red sun in the sky, more fascinating to her than the cries of the people as they woke. In Naypyitaw, Myanmar, there was a heavy, hot rain that sizzled off the burning metal bunker arch. In Xi An, China, a voice in her head sang a song she couldn't shake, a jingle from an old television show about Reading Rainbows. In Surabaya, Indonesia, the bunker was embedded in a dormant volcano at the head of a cloud-shrouded mountain range, and the people didn't speak any English at all, so she left them a radio and a frequency to dial and jumped away. In Carpentaria, Australia, she vomited blood, and at the twelfth bunker after her longest jump yet over the Pacific, in the tiny, balmy town of Apia in American Samoa, she barely even spoke to the people before jumping out of their new shield's radius to collapse on a red-tiled roof looking out over the sea.

  Her head was an inferno, too hot now to cool.

  Perhaps three days had passed. She couldn't tell and could barely think for the agony. So many jumps had left her transformed; fundamentally twisted on the line. She rolled numbly down from the roof, dropping the last stretch onto her shoulder with a crunch. Over a railing she went, staggered down a baking yellow beach and poured herself into the water.

  It gathered her in. The ocean. She laid her head down in the tide and sank. Water pooled over her face and the cool of it was delightful. Breathing didn't matter down here. She didn't care about her body anymore, not after so many jolts on the line. What was even left of her body, now? It felt like an anchor, and anchors were made to sink, so she sank. Soon her lungs began to convulse. The cool was all that mattered.

  She didn't want to see Ravi anymore, riddled with bullets in the corn. She didn't want to see him on the bed beside her, his eyes not his own and staring back at her.

  Where was he now?

  Her chest bucked in the water. He'd been with her before, so close behind a thin kind of shadow veil, but that was such a long time ago, nine bunkers earlier, and she wanted to see him as he was supposed to be; a happy friend, a lover, a husband-to-be.

  The names of all the SEAL installations burned like brands in her mind. She'd made the list years earlier with Lucas' help, with Amo's blessing, then she'd set out to destroy them all. She'd been so righteous. Their dead were going to heap up around her, thousands upon thousands, and now she'd saved them all.

  How odd that was. She'd offered them no treaty, made no pre-conditions laid down for their survival, had only gifted their lives back to them, and for what?

  She felt the world changing out there. Her lungs took their first sip of water, salty and burning down her throat, but deliciously cool compared to the heat in her head. She didn't want to see Amo anymore, not like he'd been in Istanbul, standing over her with his shoulder hideously broken and that pawing madness in his eyes. She couldn't bear it, not from him; she needed to erase it along with the rest.

  Another little sip sent galaxies of silver spinning through the darkness. It felt much better, and wasn't it better to save rather than murder? She thought back to the days when she'd first circled the world, and what had she been dreaming of, then? Saving people. Saving herself. Finding her father.

  He cried out from his island in her head. Lint and cobbles, he shouted, but he was old now, and his words no longer made sense. Old and forgotten. There were others she owed more to, faces she liked to think of even less.

  Cerulean.

  It hurt worst to remember his face, as she dropped the silver necklace back into his lap. "I'm not your daughter," she'd said. "It's time to grow up, Robert, and stop pretending."

  There was no running away from that. She'd done that, and now every jump threw it back to her, and she was tired. Beyond everything else; the years of bullying Ravi, the years of disappointing Amo and Lara, that hurt more than anything. After that, he'd died, and there'd been no chance to apologize, no way to thank him for all that he'd done.

  The pain of it worsened with every jump. She found relief only in the water, in taking another little sip that -

  …….

  She realized distantly that she was dying.

  Bubbles popped of consciousness, so urgent, sinking into darkness fast. Was it better? Was it weaker?

  One bunker murdered, eleven saved; it was a legacy of sorts.

  …….

  It was a legacy of cold.

  Amo.

  She thought again of Amo there at the end, floating into darkness. She thought of his eyes, like Cerulean's eyes, filled with all flavors of disappointment, of love, of madness, and understood that perhaps it wasn't fear of him that hurt her so much now, but the terrible weight of responsibility.

  He was too far gone to save himself. He needed help.

  He needed her.

  But who was she to help him?

  ……..

  Her arms jerked in the dark water. Death throes, they called this. Better this way. What had she ever done but destroy? Eleven bunkers saved was good, but Ravi, the baby, Pet
ers, so many things were gone forever. She had pledged herself to so much destruction.

  But those eyes remained, Amo's eyes mingling with Cerulean's eyes. What did she owe any of them, really? She'd never asked to be born into their world. She'd never known the world before the ocean came, she cared nothing for its people or its customs, for its mistakes or its stupid, crumbling morality.

  But still, in the darkness as she shuddered away, she couldn't look away from those eyes, couldn't ignore the questions they insisted on asking. They were everything now, becoming one great, bright eye rimmed with golden light. Amo's eye, and Ravi's eye, and Cerulean's eye, and Lara's eyes, and her father's white eyes, and so much regret.

  So much regret.

  Somewhere far off a giant stood atop his island and roared.

  "Anna," he cried, though she didn't know whose name that was, or why they were calling it so desperately. "Anna!"

  The last convulsions passed. She closed her eyes and felt peace. Wasn't it good to be going home? Soon she would be back in bed and her father would be there to tuck her in, and the Hatter would be there with them nosing her wetly, and her mother would be there too, somewhere in the distance as a loving memory, and all she wanted was that.

  "Anna!!"

  The world and the eye and the coming of enemy angels were nothing to her. She felt their hot fall across the surface of the Earth even now, crisscrossing her stitched pattern of leper-shield cairns, bound for Istanbul and another end, but what was that to her?

  How was that her responsibility anymore?

  "Anna!"

  Then Ravi was there at her side, maybe for the last time, using himself up. His sandy brown hair drifted around his face like seaweed in the darkness. He didn't need to say anything. She saw the truth in his eyes, which were the same eye, like the universe had blinked and was looking all the way down into her soul.

  He saw her as the little girl. He saw her as the woman. He saw that she was tired, and broken, and going mad, and he asked for more. He asked for the warrior who would break down the doors of hell and turn back the hands of time.

  It made her crack inside. He'd always seen the best things about her and raised them up. His loving gaze had helped build the woman she had now become. He wasn't poisonous or cruel, not snarled up inside with ambition or the need for respect, but good and loving. He'd always loved her, and he needed her help still.

  There was work yet to do, and how could she turn her gaze from that?

  The jump came in her death throes. She flung a hand up, caught hold of a passing wave on the line and let it wrench her away. Thousands of miles she flew at once, the furthest, the hardest, halfway round the world to land with a wet thump and a final pulse in the midst of the escape convoy fleeing Istanbul, on the floor behind Lucas and Sulman as they worked feverishly on their cure.

  15. JAKE

  Lucas was standing above her when she roused. She moved at once to stand, in a dim van somewhere rattling along a ruined old road, but he pressed a hand firmly against her chest.

  "Wait," he said, "you're far from ready to-"

  She pushed against him, and he pushed back.

  "Anna, please, wait just a moment!"

  The line resolved under her touch and she readied to send a pulse charging into his body, rearranging his particles, but at the last moment he gathered himself and spat out the news he'd been willing himself to give.

  "Jake died."

  That felled her.

  She sagged back on the gurney. The throbbing in her head came back.

  Jake?

  "Don't try to speak," he went on, quietly but urgent, "you'll just do more damage. I don't know what happened to you, but you've fried your lungs and throat. You did it, Anna. We're getting messages in from all ten of the other bunkers, so you must have gone to them all. I don't know how, or what cost that levied, but I can't let you get up and keep jumping like this. You're right on the edge, Anna. We ran a scan and the patterns in your head, your spine, to be honest every cell of your body, they're on levels I didn't think were possible. Your brain is literally pulling itself apart."

  He stepped back and took a breath, as if surprised he'd been able to give such a speech. He looked in her eyes, and maybe saw some of the pain.

  "I don't know how you're even breathing," he added, more gently now. "It beggars belief."

  She stared at him.

  Belief?

  She reached inward, and yes, she could feel the damage in her lungs now. In her throat, layered in ways of knowing she hadn't had before. It wasn't only the pain that was new, but also a kind of deep knowledge; of her own anatomy, of her malfunctioning cells, of her cracked vibration on the line. She remembered nearly drowning in the sea off Apia, and through the fog of the headache she also remembered why.

  It brought on a bad hangover freighted with secret shame. She'd tried to die.

  But Jake?

  It was an easy thing now to reach inside and repair her throat. There were pieces out of place, cells that were damaged, and she rallied the T4 to fix them. It knew the way. It was her servant and responded at once. Flesh knitted, cells repaired, drawing on deep wells of the line to fuel the transformation.

  She opened her mouth, and to Lucas' astonishment, spoke.

  "Tell me about Jake."

  For a long moment he stared. He spluttered. He looked around the rumbling space; one of the medical vehicles on the move, loaded with smudged medical equipment, a microscope, a rickety centrifuge, racks of blood in a fridge, but found no answers there. Eventually he settled on her.

  "How did you do that? Your throat was burnt, Anna. Your vocal cords were gone!"

  She felt deeper inside herself, studying the shape of her mind, the deep fatigue in her muscles, and sent the T4 to do its work there too. In seconds she was feeling better. Perhaps if she'd known about this before, she could have helped more. She could have healed Peters, and herself. She could have healed Jake.

  Her eyes snapped back to Lucas.

  "Jake," she said, then jumped -

  In a freezer car rumbling along at the back of the convoy, she stood before his body. He lay on a metal morgue tray, coated in places with the thin layer of crisping yellowy skin they'd tried to graft onto him, covered in other places with the same damp white bandaging that Joran Helkegarde had used. Peeking through these sad, ineffective coverings lay the red of raw muscle, like meat laid out on a butcher's block.

  Looking at him like this felt like seeing a whole life laid out. He'd been the first person she'd spoken to on the road to New LA. He'd been so young then, though she'd always thought he was so old. Only a few years older than she was now, but still so far away from finding a person to love him back.

  The cold wagon stopped moving abruptly, and Anna heard the shouts, slammed doors and slapping footfalls as Lucas came running. She touched Jake's cheek, and a tear splashed off her thumb. She closed her eyes and listened to the line.

  The T4 was in him, too. It was corrupted beyond belief, twisted by the Lyell's DNA and consuming itself. It was dead, just as Jake was dead, but perhaps…

  She lifted her gaze on the line, up to the fog where she'd seen Ravi, where she'd glimpsed shades of all those others pulling at her as she jumped from place to place, their memories and dreams snagging into her mind like soft fishhooks, burrowing deep and leaving her changed.

  Jake was with them. The trails were faint but clear in the air, like the spreading wake of a catamaran. As she saw those trails, she realized she could reach up and pull him back, just like they'd hooked onto her. At the same time she pulsed energy into his corpse, jolting the T4 to life and directing it to clean itself.

  So his fake skin crinkled away, shed like old bark, and a fresh layer of smooth, youthful skin grew up from raw muscle, clothing his naked thighs and chest, covering his beautiful, kind face and springing fresh black hair up from his scalp. His eyelids came back, and his hands gloved themselves in pale, baby-like pink skin, and soon he looked as if he wa
s only sleeping, and she caught his trail with the other hand, high above, and gave a preliminary tug-

  "Stop, Anna!"

  The doors of the morgue van clattered, letting in steamy Mediterranean air, and Lucas lurched in and over to stand across Jake's body from her. When he saw what she'd done already he turned white and sagged, only just catching himself on the railing.

  "What have you done? What do you think you're doing?"

  She didn't have to listen to him. She had Jake's thread in her hand, seconds away from returning, but perhaps Lucas had a right to know before it was done.

  "I'm saving him," she said. "I'm doing what you should have done."

  "Stop doing it!" he shouted, so loud in the echoing metal box that it hurt. "Anna, whatever you're thinking, you can't. He died, Anna. He died last night, in my arms, and I won't let you bring him back. I loved him more than you, more than any of you, and I can't let you do that to him."

  Anna let her eyes drop from the line to rest on him. He seemed so very small; a fragile, temporary creature, wracked with emotions. She looked through him and saw the Lyell's eating into his cells also. There was a patch of skin on his back slipping loose already, and one on his forearm. This was simple, and natural. She reached out through the line and smoothed the pieces back into position. She rewrote his T4 with a thought, and set it to healing rather than tearing itself apart.

  His eyes widened at the changes inside. A red blotch on his cheek faded into ruddy health. He gasped, then pulled back his sleeve and studied his forearm, where he ripped away a bandage to reveal clean, firm skin underneath.

  "I don't understand," he said, reeling now, looking from his arm to Anna to Jake on the gurney table, fully clothed in skin. His corpse seemed so alive, like at any moment it might open its eyes and breathe. Anna could see just how to do it. She could feel the ragged edges where his thread had been cut, could sense exactly the way to suture the pieces back together again. It would be easy.